Dear Agency Founder

Why design agencies are different

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A design agency appears because a person exhibits four qualities:

Creative talent, taste, eye, precision, and an ability to execute.
Strategic thinking, the ability to connect a real problem with a solution.
Commercial nous. The ability to sell, persuade, and negotiate price.
Entrepreneurial drive and accountability.

With these four things, a business appears around a person.

And you become entangled.

The same thing that meant you could start an agency is the thing that gets you stuck.

And this is why it feels like your fault. Because it is.

It’s your fault it started and your fault it’s stuck.

While reading this article it’s important to remember that running a design agency didn’t make you like this, your skills and instinctive behaviours have self-selected you as a design agency founder.

So you get started (and we are proud of you for that, not many manage it), and you start the journey straight down the design agency founder entanglement spiral.

So cynical.

There is probably a brief period of time on the lip of the spiral where you aren’t stuck and you feel like you can grow this thing forever.

Remember it?

Great. Let’s move on.

Let’s understand the areas you get stuck that founders of other types of agency don’t.

Selling is more complex and you have to do more of it

When people want design it’s because they have a problem and don’t know the solution. The sales process is therefore more consultative and requires the most experienced person in the business. You.

On top of that you need to do more of it. There is a natural demand for project work in design. The largest value design can deliver is going from old to new. Consequently, retainer work is lower value, leading to more “churn” (or as we call it, the end of a project). This leads to more pressure on new business. More pressure on you.

Talent is hard to find and afford

You need people skilled in client management, commercial sense, design taste, and execution. It’s rare and expensive to find these qualities. It’s no surprise that the only person you can afford to do it is the one willing to work extra for less money. You.

Your ability to do great work will both grow you and increase the “clients buy the founder” factor. This entanglement was completely inevitable from the start! If anyone ever tells you “it’s your fault” then keep reading their articles because, as we’ve established, it is.

Untangling involves stepping back and you can’t

You need a plan to get out of this but you don’t have time to plan.

😐

How other (not design) agencies do this stuff

You’ve searched for the magic solution, but the advice out there is for other types of agency. They aren’t selling magic beans, this stuff works if you are selling something different to design.

Find one offer for one ICP in one niche. That kind of thing.

If your offer is simple you can productise it and sell by numbers.
If your processes and tactics are repeatable you can document them and scale.
If you can prove value with KPIs then you can get and grow retainers providing a steady increase in profit that you can invest into your unentanglement plan.

It’s not that you shouldn’t be aware of these strategies, there are places they can help in a design agency. But they ride against some fundamental truths of design itself.

Design is most valuable when it’s a step into the unknown. We may know the outcome but we always want it to be different and better than before.

You can’t document, systemise or automate taste and decision making. If you could then we’d have all packed our bags and gone home by now.

Design is often project-based and operates in the middle of the funnel where it’s hard to prove value. If you think you are going to sit back with MRR on repeat then the laws of demand have news for you.

How you need to do this

The ways out aren’t easy but they are doable. You need a plan for the investment it will take.

That starts with visibility. A big problem of entanglement is that the performance of your agency is often hidden by you working a bit extra for free and taking home less than your market rate.

Finding your replacement will be hard enough without also needing them to work for peanuts.

You need to know the profit it will take. That will trigger some uncomfortable truths around clients you shouldn’t be working for, people you shouldn’t be employing, and conversations about rates you need to be having.

Then you need to start that investment into:

Employer brand and relationships

Even with the plan you are going to be at the bottom end of the market wages-wise, so how are you going to compensate for that with the things you do have to offer? Culture and opportunity are desirable.

Pipeline that compounds

What can you create that will introduce you to new people, engage them and keep that relationship warm over time? How do the people you admire do it? An event? Authentic presence on social media? A publication? What’s yours and how are you going to make it happen?

Sounds easy?

If it were easy then it wouldn’t be valuable. Building this business would be a waste of time.

Luckily it is valuable. Taking the parts of you (talent, drive, sense) that were good enough to start this thing and turning it into a team that can deliver on the big projects is worth it.

People pay to work with you because they can’t do all that themselves.

Getting entangled was a valuable thing to do.

But yesterday’s solution is today’s problem, and now it’s time for the next step.

So, why aren't people tracking their time?

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One of the most important skills in life is to notice when you are in a bubble of your own beliefs.

I found myself in one recently, and getting out of it taught me something important about running agencies. Thanks, brain. #blessed for how interesting you are.

Through a back-and-forth on the cauldron of ideas that is Reddit (it me btw) I was initially stunned that when one agency founder admitted they struggled to get their team to track time, everyone else said that they didn’t track time at all.

In fact they thought the idea was stupid.

Whatever your reaction to that, whether you are in my bubble or not, this article will hopefully teach you something about how to run your agency.

So the consensus was: tracking time is a waste of time.

Initially I went into ‘someone is wrong on the internet’ mode because I’d always tracked time. At first to do billing, and later to do fancy graphs around where our profit was coming from so the leadership team could make very important strategies.

But these people are no mugs. They are running successful agencies.

When everyone is saying the opposite, find out why.

The reasons people don’t track time

You aren’t billing time and materials.

Needing to time track to bill is the primary reason why people start time tracking. Naturally this is a decision taken quite early on.

You’re not particularly sophisticated around internal rates (the amount that your team cost you per hour), nor do you need to be. In fact the whole financials thing is less important. It’s you, a bank balance and a focus on getting some clients. Profit ratios can wait.

Even if you do track time at the start, you’re making up an external rate (what you charge clients per hour) on vibes. So the whole profitability side of things is still a guess.

So why doesn’t this lack of financial detail come back to bite you?

Because the guess is easy.

You’re likely to be doing smaller projects, with a smaller team, on salaries you can afford.

If the effort required for a project is fairly consistent, people’s salaries are fairly similar, and you’re charging a similar price each time, then you have just got one piece of maths to do.

You end up with one sum.

Because your costs aren’t fluctuating wildly either that sum is actually quite functional as a way of making sure you make money.

If any of those factors slip:

a project is going to require a lot more effort,
a project is of a lower budget,
or you hire someone for a significantly higher salary

you know that you need to adjust your price.

At first, you can probably make those adjustments on vibes too.

The tricky bit comes when those factors slowly start drifting. When the amount of work something takes changes, or the price you can charge is challenged, or people’s salaries start broadening out.

But what if you avoid the tricky bit?

Not all of the agencies that were anti-time-tracking were new or unsophisticated.

Some have found a way to have good visibility on what they’re doing and to remove the overhead of timesheet tracking and analysis.

They’ve done that by making their services productised.

If effort, salaries and price stay about the same on every project, your profit is predictable. And if tracking would find you less money than it costs in time and hassle, skipping it is a fair call.

If you deliver a known scope, with people on stable salaries, and at the same price each time, tracking won’t tell you much more than your one big sum.

As well as delivering the services you also need to know what it costs to sell them. If you are selling the same thing each time this number could stay stable too.

Of course, there are other benefits of being productised. You’re easy to buy. You can value price. You can build a reputation for that one thing. We’ve all read that book, but who knew it included not needing to track time?

The strengths and weaknesses of an untracked life

The productised, timesheetless agency is perhaps having a moment because efficiency is its game. Right now, we’re all becoming more efficient.

By being productised, you price on the outcome. Agencies billing by the hour are under pressure because clients know AI makes the work faster. You aren’t.

In fact AI is going to allow you to decrease the time to deliver, so without doing any calculation at all, you know that your profit’s going to go in the right direction (as long as you keep the cost of delivery stable, ie wages remain the same and token cost is negligible).

This is a business set for scale, repeating that outcome, adding more people, and winning more clients. Its drawback is that it’s not built for change. New services, bigger clients, more strategic engagements. Anything which makes your levers volatile is going to leave you in the dark around how much money you make.

Hire a senior person, and the projects they’re on will make less money. Do a job where scope is uncertain, and that fixed price may be too low.

This was my agency as we moved from websites and generalist work to product UX for bigger and bigger clients. The cost of delivering those changed a lot. The cost of selling them too. We needed to know where we were with profitability and many times the analysis told us we were in the wrong place. Our biggest client was sucking up resource and not delivering the money.

It’s hard to change so it had better work

This exploration left me thinking.

What I learned is that it’s not just early-stage and solo founders that don’t see time tracking as valuable.

There are people who have got at least as far as I did, if not further. Not on vibes, but by setting up their business so every project makes a predictable profit. They made it so it just worked.

I think I’m still in the track-your-time club because, as someone clever once said to me, “our people’s time is our inventory, and we track inventory”. Tracking time also doesn’t stop you being productised and taking advantage of that. You can have both.

Whether you track time is also a decision that shapes your business, and it’s hard to change. Getting a team that has never done timesheets to start would be a big ask.

There’s something even harder to change.

Harder than changing process is changing beliefs. And that applies to anything about your business.

Clearly there are successful agencies tracking time and successful agencies who aren’t.

Whichever you are, you can point out what the other is doing wrong, or you can try and understand what works. You can steal from the business you don’t want to be.

Getting out of your bubble takes effort.

And…

(urge to ruin nice ending rising)

And if you don’t track that effort…

(he’s back in the bubble)

… if you don’t track that effort…

(here it comes)

then how do you expect to know how profitable it was???!!!

(take him away)

You don't have to get out of delivery

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

You don’t have to get out of delivery.

Agencies that are too reliant on their founder do have a problem. It’s just not the problem you think it is.

It’s not the work you need to get away from. It’s the accountability.

You’re great at the work. You think more strategically than everyone else on your team. But you’re too proactive. Years of entrepreneurial drive means you jump in and put out the fire, then the next fire, then the fire after that.

You take ownership of everything. Of course you do, that’s how you got here.

So let’s get you out of delivery.

Hang on. This is a competitive market. Your ability to swoop into a project, wow a client, and make things better is an asset. If you’re not doing that, is the business using you to the fullest?

The bit you’re actually bad at is the decision about when to step in. And it’s not even a decision. It’s an instinct. An ingrained behaviour at this point.

So, what to do?

Well, unsurprisingly, here’s some thoughts…

Why are you looking for someone just like you?

The thought of replacing yourself is daunting. You could make a case for it being impossible.

Your knowledge and vision, your ability to sell and deliver, the unique way you’re compensated and incentivised as the founder. That’s not easy to recreate.

The good news is, if you’re looking for someone who can do what you do, you’re looking in the wrong place.

Why would you want more of you? You’re the person who caused this mess.

What you’re looking for is something different.

You, but spread out across more people.

First the accountability bit.

Get someone who makes that decision about when you should step in. Someone that treats you like a resource. They own the outcome (do good work, make the sale, whatever it is). They have the whole team and a finite amount of you that they can use, and when they activate you, the scope is defined.

Bonus value: when the scope of what you do is defined, you are on the road to finding someone else who can be that specific resource. That’s the delivery bit of you.

The reason you’re hard to replace is that you’re you. This exact set of skills and experience that fits what the business needs like a glove, because that’s why the business exists in its current shape.

We don’t want all of you. We want bits of you.

The accountability bit, the delivery bit, the sales bit.

The combination in one person is hard to find. Split them out and it’s more common. There might even be someone in your team ready to do it.

This approach also means you are ready to be replaced, but you don’t have to do it right now.

Should you even be doing this right now?

Is it such a bad thing that your agency relies on you? You’re being paid, after all.

Is a business being efficient if it doesn’t get the maximum back from its most expensive person?

And aside from getting your money’s worth: is now the moment to pull you off strategic client work and relationships? Is hiring your replacement the investment the business should be making?

Have we grown to the point where you can step back yet, or should we invest the replacing you money in growth?

Eventually, if you want to exit, there needs to be a point where nothing relies on you. But how do you get from here to there?

By being balanced, probably.

By making you replaceable and using you as an asset, waiting for the moment where you are more valuable out of delivery than in it.

How to get leads is the wrong question

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

As a founder you are supposed to think big, but the pressure makes you think narrow.

Take getting leads for example, the question I see asked most.

And the answers I see given are all… unsatisfactory.

Actually that’s wrong, they are all surface-level satisfying. Very moreish in fact.

Quick wins and guaranteed results, when as leaders we should know deep down that things aren’t that simple.

Let’s be generous, the stress and demands of making payroll, staying profitable and growing make us suggestible.

We become open to the quick fix. The surefire way to get more leads we think we can copy. That it’s just a numbers game. And we find plenty of people with solutions to sell who tell us that we’re right. It is just an amount of emails or DMs, a positioning exercise, a template, reply template. TEMPLATE. TEMPLATE.

Replying ‘template’ is satisfying. The template itself… 😑.

Something in our lizard brain that knows how important those leads are is ready to believe.

Stress tightens us up, we stop seeing it big, we drop everything and work on what we decide is our number one priority, finding someone who will buy and finding them now.

And so we ask the question.

How do I get leads?

We ask that question in forums and search engines and AI chats.

And we want the satisfying answer.

Something that will work for me short term with the steps to follow spelt out.

The unsatisfying answer: it depends. By that I mean “It depends” is the unsatisfying answer, not that it depends what makes an answer unsatisfying. Though that is actually also true. I rest my case.

We ignore it.

And so we get satisfying answers. Of course we do. The places we search prioritise answers. If they don’t give us answers, we stop visiting. So answers we get.

This isn’t Big Search’s fault though.

We demand satisfying answers of each other as well. We upvote a step-by-step guide. We subscribe to a newsletter which delivers the playbook. We get what we ask for.

And so our business is as good as our questions.

How do I get leads?

When things seem tight or our desperation levels are raised because we’ve just started and we want to survive or because the market is throwing us curveballs.

Or because the answer we had stops working.

You can ask the question again. Or maybe it’s time to change the question. Why did I get leads? Why does that business I want to be like get leads? Or if you’ve ever bought anything ever, why did I become a buyer?

These questions are frustrating, because the answers are further away. They’re not the satisfying answers straight out of the satisfying answer bank, because they involve us and everything that makes us different.

Why am I different?

Oh, good question.

A question that might start you down the path of what could work for you long term.

There are good differences and bad differences.

The good difference is your uniqueness. Your mix of skills and beliefs. Your secret recipe.

But sometimes the differences are the reason those off-the-shelf tactics aren’t working, you just aren’t in the same position as that person in terms of size or credibility. Or it’s an outside factor like the market you are in or the macroeconomics.

Your recipe doesn’t have the same ingredients. The tactic depends on something you don’t have.

Sometimes the differences aren’t a quick fix. The size of your reputation, the number of relationships you have, the amount of time you’ve been in business, your previous work.

The ingredient here is time.

Time is unsatisfying.

But team, this is a good thing. If all the answers to “how do I get leads?” were quick fixes, everyone would have leads, and therefore no one would have leads.

For your business to exist, there needs to be a barrier to entry. There needs to be some reward for actually being good.

So how do I get good?

Lovely question! I am actually incredibly proud of you for getting this far and asking this question.

And I’m also nervous. Because there’s a part of your brain that’s still holding out for the satisfying answer.

How do you get the relationships, reputation, credibility and a history of great work?

What should you reply with to get those?

You get them the same way you get leads.

You embrace “it depends”.

You find the right question, with the unsatisfying answer, and then consistently show up and do the work over a longer period of time than you currently find comfortable to think about.

You’ll never answer it.

But if you never stop asking it.

You’ll be good.

These 2 things are not the same

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

These two things are not the same.

How you calculate your target rate
How you actually price

How you calculate your target rate

This is maths. You need to take everything you spend across the business (on people and other things) and then add the profit you want to make and divide it by all the billable time you expect to do.

That gives you an amount of money per hour (or per day, depending on how you like your maths).

As you grow and have people on different salaries or who bill different proportions of their time, then you need to make the maths more complicated to make sure everyone is covering the right amount proportional to what they cost.

I have a spreadsheet for this. Get in touch if you want it.

This is your target rate.

It doesn’t matter if you do time and materials or value pricing, retainer or fixed fee, you need to know this number.

How you actually price

Maths is good for calculating your target rate and making sure you are profitable.

Maths is bad if you are trying to explain your pricing to a client or even quickly working out yourself what you should be putting in a proposal.

Clients need to understand pricing and you need to understand pricing. Maths makes it harder to understand.

You should actually price using a simple model.

A flat rate across the business that beats the target rate
A rate card for different roles or seniority that beats the target rate
A fixed-price project that, when you divide that price by the time it took, beats the target rate
A value-priced project that, when the outcome is delivered, and you calculate the value, and then get paid, and then check how much time it took you, and then divide that by the time it took you, beats the target rate.

These are not the same thing

Calculating your target rate does not mean you are time and materials, it means you are armed with the information you need to grow.

You can still beat your target rate by a lot in your pricing. What this gives you is you now know exactly how much you’re beating it by, and you get a warning if, once everything’s factored in, you’re not beating it at all (which will happen as your business collects more moving parts).

When you add a new person or give someone a pay rise you can know their new target rate and then price them to beat it.

Get in touch for that spreadsheet, and the maths is all done for you.

Redefine your Ops

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

How’s your Ops?

Could be better.

Every agency’s operations are slightly (or very) behind where they want them to be.

It’s called having a finite amount of time and you don’t like thinking about it because mortality probably. But do spend some more seconds on this article. No one on their deathbed is wishing they had read less Dear Agency Founder.

(Or written less of it! AHAHAHAHAHAAHA)

Ops is very important.

But there’s too much focus on breadth rather than depth.

The breadth of Ops

This is how many of the things you do have a documented process that gets followed. Or, because it’s 2026, how much stuff is automated and run with tokens?

Never enough, and there’s a reason for that. Because if you had the time to build too much then you weren’t doing the real work of sales and delivery. AI can build your systems quickly now for sure, but it’s a matter of focus and energy.

You’re not going to be one of those agencies that brag about their incredible systems. You’ve got people to meet!

For me breadth is for show, it’s depth for the pro.

The depth of Ops

This is the important bit.

Ops is not a set of systems, in fact it can be no systems. Ops is a set of responsibilities and the depth of your Ops is how many of those responsibilities you’ve allowed to be handled by the business rather than just you.

My definition of Ops is:

Deliver the work we’ve won, on time, to the right quality, to a target profit and get paid for it.

It’s not a “how” because the how changes. As you grow you will achieve (or not achieve) this outcome in various different ways, starting with you making it all up and ending with whole departments (or at least individuals) dedicated to achieving each part.

You can’t not do Ops, you’re always doing Ops, you can only do it badly.

And so the depth of your Ops is how much you let go of these things and hand them over.

This is how Ops gets you out of delivery.

High-stakes Ops

You get what you incentivise.

Give your team a process and they will follow that process. This is low-stakes Ops. You feel like you’ve handed over responsibility but you haven’t handed over accountability.

If things happen that take the team outside that process then this falls down. If there’s opportunity to improve the process, it won’t be taken.

Low-stakes Ops also maps quite nicely to the things you can give AI to do.

Tell the team to make a profit and they will find a way (or you’ll find out you need a better team, get one, and they’ll find a way).

This is high-stakes Ops because… what if they don’t? Well that would be bad, but now you’ve got an interesting founder problem to solve.

And it’s not a problem you can solve with AI, AI has no skin in this game.

Solving this will have more impact than connecting your systems with Zaps or writing down processes. That’s not a founder approach, however satisfying it may be.

The founder approach is “how can I point this team I’ve invested in at a target and keep on top of whether they are hitting it?”.

The higher the stakes on that target, the deeper the Ops.

The stakes matter.

It’s the difference between completing work and making sure the client is happy.

It’s the difference between raising an invoice and making money.

It’s the difference between you spending less time in delivery, and actually stepping away.

Give them what they want

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A quick reminder to give them what they want.

Your potential clients, that is. They get in touch asking for something. Give them what they’re asking for. What they woke up that morning needing.

But Dan, these people don’t understand what they want.

They come to us asking for deliverables when they want outcomes.

They come looking for short-term strategies when they need sustainable long-term growth.

They come asking for something their boss will like, but they have no idea if their users want it.

Dan, you’ve misunderstood us. We’re consultative and strategic. We’re evidence-backed. If you want that pointless knee-jerk project done, go to one of the hundreds of (admittedly profitable) agencies that will do it for you.

Because our agency is different.

It has enough authority to take someone with zero demand or awareness of the deep strategic work we do, and, in the short timeframe and limited touchpoints the sales cycle allows, change beliefs they have held for years.

They’ve displayed the thing we need from the world (the motivation to get in touch with us and spend money), we’ll undo that motivation and rebuild it in line with our way of thinking.

A 15-minute initial phone call, a half-hour video call, and a big proposal that they don’t actually read are all we need.

If they choose another agency, so be it! We were about to qualify them out anyway.

They went with who? Urgh, not them. I hate them.

Look at them with their stupid website. Hmmm, they’re still working with that other client we lost to them two years back. Actually, that’s quite nice. Looks like, after doing that initial ****show of a project, they actually saw the light and started investing in what mattered. I guess they must have needed a bit longer to be influenced.

Idiots.

Well, whatever, there’s plenty of business to go round, probably. And we are going for the high end, the sophisticated people who already know what’s important and the process that needs to be followed.

We’ll find the people who know how it all works and yet still for some reason want to pay for someone else to consult with on how it all works.

We’ll find them, you’ll see.

And while we are looking you’ll also see that, under no circumstances, will we be giving anyone what they want.

Board meetings for people who don't do board meetings

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If you don’t start your own business then your first experience of a board meeting is probably walking into an established and mildly intimidating setup with a nicely shaped thing of water in the middle of the table and SLIDES.

This is the board meeting end game. The company running it will have started where you are now.

They went from

We aren’t the sort of business that runs a board meeting

Let’s run a board meeting as soon as we find the HDMI cable for this screen

They didn’t go straight to the big billy business stuff, and nor should you because the journey there is actually valuable.

The usual advice

Here’s how you’ll start running your board meeting:

You don’t share any info before and no-one prepares because they are busy
In the meeting you go through reports seeing things for the first time and discuss them
Question if the report is right and if the KPIs are the right things to be measuring
Come up with loads of ideas and go deep into problems realising you need more info to make a decision

The mature version looks nothing like this.

Here’s the way to run a board meeting:

You have a board pack that people pre-read, it has all the numbers and narrative everyone needs to know about the previous month/quarter/however often you are going to board.

Then, you spend a short time together very efficiently (even if you have a big business to run). You talk only about the things you have to talk about. Rubber-stamping decisions or mulling over a couple of options and making a call.

So if your board meeting looks like the first example then I’d advise starting to tighten them up but if you don’t run a board meeting at all then I’d allow, actually I’d encourage, the inefficient method.

Time you should have spent

The first time you’ve stepped back and looked at the business from this point of view. You haven’t spent enough time here. It will take a while to understand what you need it to be for your business. You’ve got a lot of “hang on, what’s that number?” and “where are we actually trying to get to here?” to wade through.

And that process has to happen.

If you’ve ever tried implementing a management framework (and attempting the entrepreneurial operating system is basically a rite of passage) you’ll have found it’s not as easy as the book suggests. Because you aren’t just surfacing a few numbers at first, you are realising that you need to decide what you want. It’s not a linear process.

So think of that extra time at first as paying back all the time you should have spent thinking about the business so far.

Inefficiency is growth

The bloated board meeting is where leaders are created.

First yourself. Running through and understanding all the moving parts of this business you’ve created and now need to grow. Space to ask questions and dive deep.

In the mature board meeting you don’t want to ask how net profit is calculated because, even in the friendly ones, that’s not a great look.

In your board meeting, anyone can ask how anything works (and find out that it doesn’t work properly yet, ok? we’re sorting it).

And then when it’s time to promote that superstar staff member you can invite them to come and discuss the thing they are now responsible for at the board. Depending on what you think they are ready for they can attend the whole thing.

They’ll learn how the business works.

It’s a brilliant way to get them thinking about what the board wants to see. Creating the right reports. Gaining an understanding of what matters. Listening through other functions of the business to get wider context. Learning to contribute ideas.

The bloated board meeting is a kind of rite of passage as a business matures, and it’s actually a really useful way to give up-and-coming leaders business context and a platform.

A quick thought on inefficiency

So many things in business are like this. We seek out the right way to do things and there are plenty of people willing to sell it to us. But running a business isn’t boiling an egg. The process of learning is how you find out how to apply things, mix them with your own goals and creativity, and get the outcome your business actually needs. You can’t skip it.

Something for the haters

Sometimes, unfortunately I’ve seen board meetings mocked.

I once saw an advert, or perhaps it was a postcard, with a picture of some people with surfboards and the slogan: “Ready for the board meeting?”

On the surface it’s a play on words but it actually works as a joke because it flips our expectation, when we hear “board meeting” we think of something boring, and they’re talking about surfboards, which are really exciting.

As someone who promotes board meetings I find this offensive.

I also don’t think, on average, surfing is exciting. Sure, there are people who ride 50-foot waves in the cool shorts and the hair. That’s exciting. But on average, surfing is people in wetsuits moving quite slowly and getting cold.

On average, a board meeting is more exciting than that.

Just kidding. 👁️ 🫵 🌊*

*I’ll see you in the tube

The truth about your strategic value

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Is there an agency worth its salt that doesn’t want to be a strategic partner to their clients?

To be in the room (or on the zoom) when the decision is made

To have “a seat at the table”.

(We have to presume the table is in the room.)

We’re told this is where we should be. And I agree, but…

I ran an agency for 15 years and worked with clients spending next to nothing to clients spending £250k a year on design.

And we had the goal of becoming more strategically important to our clients, because doing that made us more valuable, and got us more impactful work, which was great for growth.

It’s not quite as straightforward as the books, blogs and newsletters 🧐 would have you believe.

Here’s some things I learned.

It’s not up to you

Firstly, how valuable you are is your client’s decision, not yours.

We believe every business should invest in our services. This is our specialism. It’s the thing we’ve dedicated our careers to. So of course, we hold the belief that it’s a really important thing, be it design, marketing, brand, or SEO.

Every business that invests in our thing will grow, and all who ignore it, well, good luck, as they say, with that.

However, if your client just isn’t buying into that ongoing retainer or letting you into the strategic decisions around their own growth it may be that they don’t hold that belief.

They, like plenty of other businesses, are going to grow with less of a focus on your set of skills.

To them, the services you provide might just be table stakes, not a multiplier.

The services that you provide might just be a requirement rather than something they believe is going to provide them with huge results.

I know, the nerve of these people!

But that’s how beliefs work

The lesson is not to spend time trying to change the mind of people who don’t see things like you do. Instead, spend that time trying to find the clients who do.

There’s some clients you have to grow past till you find the ones that are going to retain you, value you, and keep working with you.

The non believers can be important, as we’ll get to next.

You’ll always be just a cog to some of your clients

Second thing to know is that even when you do become that consultative strategic agency, it’s still only a percentage of your clients that will treat you like that.

On some of our largest accounts, we were still just order takers.

And from there, you’ve got two choices. You either do what the advisors say and sack them to focus on clients that truly treat you as a strategic advisor, or you accept that that’s not going to be true for every engagement.

We did the latter. There was plenty of money on the table to be had just for doing execution. And there aren’t many agencies that don’t say yes to some of that work, because it’s profit and helps them grow in other ways.

It can’t be just positioning

Finally, if you want to become a strategic advisor to clients, you need to make sure you can actually deliver.

Is your team experienced and able to be consultative?

Because actual strategy is way more than just the best practices and thought pieces written by people in your industry, for people in your industry. Saying that you can help with design strategy and then going in and parroting things you’ve read in books isn’t going to get very far.

They don’t want an info product, they want something they can take action on.

If you’re going to actually be invited to the decision-making table (in the room or on the zoom we presume), you need to understand the client’s entire business, where your services fit within that, and provide advice within context.

You can position yourself and pitch it but it can take time.

During the sales process everyone is excited and big impact is discussed because you are trying to impress and they are giddy with the potential of the whole thing.

The project starts and you get the feeling that they just want you to get on with it. Where’s the room gone? And the table?

But that’s pretty normal, you are there to deliver and until you’re proven they don’t want the distraction.

When it does happen it’s often bit by bit.

It’s organic because we encouraged our team to ask questions about the client’s business, to be consultative, to look at what was happening in the market, and bring those bits of advice into their projects.

We actively trained people on the how to be a strategic advisor alongside their actual role and incentivised those conversations.

The result was that it slowly moved the needle.

Rather than clients coming to me and saying, “Please help with strategy,” it was actually trust built via our team that led them to say, “What should we do next?”

And we could then say, “Let’s run a workshop and help you decide.”

We’ll book a room.

Are agencies dead?

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I got asked if agencies were dead.

It’s an annoying question that makes a reasonable headline.

So I gave an annoying answer.

I said in a sense they were never alive.

Every business is just an abstract concept. A registration number that humans flock around, building things, cold emailing other abstract concepts and recording the results in spreadsheets.

They acknowledged it had been an annoying question and gave me a second chance.

We tried to find the real question.

Because businesses will always need other businesses to achieve outcomes for them.

And that’s what an agency does, be it creative, marketing, recruitment or cleaning.

The question is about your business.

Is AI going to change things so much that the outcomes your agency achieves are no longer in demand, or are achieved in other ways?

So now we can establish whether you are dead. How lovely.

What makes you worth it

You’re worth it when you can reach an outcome at a better return on investment than any other way of getting there.

That return has a few moving parts.

How much effort it takes. How much skill and experience.

What it costs, and how efficiently it can be done.

How fast.

Then the outcome itself. How much impact it has. And the risk of not pulling it off.

You’re not going to win on efficiency.

All things equal, an in-house team is cheaper. AI is cheaper than both of you. So is your client’s nephew, and the guy from IT who reckons he can do it.

That wasn’t ever a way to win.

Where you actually win

You win where skill and experience are a multiplier.

There are going to be few things AI can’t do. But there are plenty where doing it well makes all the difference.

AI gets everyone to good enough. You’re for the work where good enough isn’t.

Outcomes of complexity and high quality.

And you win where the stakes are high.

High impact, which makes it high risk, because getting it wrong is expensive.

That’s when people stop only wanting capability and start wanting someone accountable too.

They could hire the people themselves. But then they carry that risk. You’re the one who’s done it before, and can be held to doing it again.

AI doesn’t take away any risk. In fact, it probably introduces more.

The risk of things that look great but turn out not to be.

Perhaps you always wanted to work in these places of high value and high impact. It’s always been my goal.

Now is the time to work out how to get there.

And hey, I’m sure there are other combinations of these factors that work if you find the right outcome. You might deliver something lower value, super efficiently, that’s still tricky enough to need your experience.

Find the situation where you’re the best return on investment.

That’s where your agency lives.

An expected bonus isn't a bonus

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The founder instinct

As founders who run an awesome company, we love our teams and we want to share the spoils.

We certainly don’t want them to see those proposal values increasing in size and think that we are keeping it all ourselves (as if).

So we want them to feel the benefit, and have some skin in the game, and maybe one day that will help us step away a bit.

Our problem-solving mind lands on bonuses and profit share, and it feels simple.

You don’t look up how a bonus works. You just give someone a bonus, and then they’re happy.

But like everything, there are gotchas and traps.

Maybe it’s not even you deciding to do a bonus. Maybe it’s your team coming to you, talking about how they’d like to be incentivised.

I’m a huge fan of making it up as you go along, except when the consequences are hard to change.

When it comes to money, once you start giving something, it’s hard to take it away.

A bonus isn’t a gift, it’s a strategy

The mistake is to think that a bonus is some kind of gift. There’s money in the account, let’s give it to this hard working person so they feel happy.

Actually they are an investment and you need to use them strategically. Like everything you spend, you should get something back.

So what do you get back? A few things you might be trying for:

You make it clear you appreciate someone’s effort when they went above and beyond
You want to ensure someone performs well consistently
You create a sense of team and shared achievement
You want people to care as much as you do so you can step away

These are different goals which require different investments.

To invest well you need to understand the types of incentive (some of them aren’t strictly bonuses). So let’s spend the rest of the article running through the types you need to know (including a type of reward that I think is a small agency’s secret weapon).

Commission

Commission links someone’s compensation to an aspect of their performance. The classic is a salesperson or account manager who gets a cut of the revenue or profit on the deals they win.

Here’s the mechanic. The base salary is acceptable but deliberately, slightly unsatisfactory. They expect, and you expect, that they’ll earn enough commission to turn it into the wage they actually want, and then go beyond it.

It works when the thing you’re incentivising has no real upper limit. Revenue is always good for most businesses. Yes, there’s a ceiling on what an agency can deliver, but that’s a nice problem to have, and you wouldn’t want to turn off the tap. High performers earn proportional to the value they provide, so you retain them without overpaying.

It doesn’t work so well elsewhere, because of the message it sends. Put a sysadmin on commission for uptime and you realise you can’t beat 100%. There’s only downside for them.

You also get exactly what you incentivise, so be careful what you set. Set contracted revenue as the target and qualification slips, because once the deal’s signed, the person earning the commission doesn’t care if the project goes well. So, often you’d structure commission on revenue over the first six or twelve months, so the value is actually realised before you pay out, which makes a salesperson more discerning about the deals they chase.

Commission only works where a person links very directly to value. Which is why it makes less sense for an engineer or a designer. They aren’t responsible for the rate that was set or the scope, and they’ve got less control over the revenue of the deal.

Profit share

Profit share is a regular cut of profits shared out across the business.

You use it to give people buy-in, to get a higher level of effort and to make them more proactive about finding opportunities. It sets a tone: the business is driven by profit, and everyone shares in it. It lets you push financial performance without it looking like something that’s only in the owners’ interest.

Things to consider. It’s normally spread across everyone, which means the person giving more effort and the person giving less get the same bonus. That can breed resentment, and the bit going to the person doing less is wasted money.

Profit also isn’t fully in the team’s control, because it’s influenced by costs. Decide to invest and make less profit this year, and you’re stuck either telling staff their bonus is down, or doing accounting gymnastics to strip that cost back out.

There’s a version that looks at delivery margin instead, the profit on the project you’re actually working on rather than whole-company profit. That solves some of the control problem, but some projects make more than others, and now you’re heading towards a complex scheme.

And people grew to expect it. And as soon as a bonus is expected, it stops doing its job, and on a quiet quarter you get a double whammy: less money in the bonus and a sense that things aren’t going great. So watch out, profit share means being more open with performance. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but you need to be ready to communicate at that level.

Performance-related bonus

Then there’s the performance-related bonus for an individual. It’s different from commission, because there’s no revenue number to link it to. It’s normally tied to a target, like client satisfaction.

The pro is that you incentivise a specific outcome, and you should see that outcome improve.

The thing to consider is where the performance of the role stops and the “above and beyond” begins. You’d hope someone who’s there to achieve an outcome would want to do it to the best of their ability anyway, without the extra incentive.

Are you just paying someone more to “do their job”?

And that cuts both ways, if a team member is doing their job to a consistently high standard wouldn’t they be right to expect you to commit to a pay rise?

They will end up expecting it, and then the month it doesn’t happen, it’ll feel like a pay cut.

I’m being down on these, they can work if you design them well, just don’t decide to do them on a whim and expect to avoid unintended consequences.

The ad hoc bonus

This is the one I think I’m most in favour of. You spot when someone’s gone above and beyond, hit a milestone, shown real loyalty, or when you just want to make an example of them and make them feel appreciated. A surprise bonus really does the trick.

An unexpected bonus is a wonderful thing. It’s literally the definition of the word. Something on top. Something that perhaps wasn’t planned for.

The thing to remember is consistency. If they go above and beyond again, are you going to do it again? If someone else hits the same milestone, do they get one too? Because as soon as you’ve got a standardised trigger, it’s a scheme, and it falls foul of the rule that an expected bonus isn’t really a bonus.

So, again, you can do this, you just need to be ready with answers to the above questions. And they can be open and honest.

“This is a one-off discretionary bonus to recognise a moment of brilliance that was valuable to the business.”

“u done well”

An incentive needs communication, none of the types work if people don’t understand why.

Non-financial rewards

The secret weapon I mentioned above.

Remember that as a small, flexible company you can provide opportunities.

Not everyone is incentivised by money. And given you probably can’t pay absolute top rate, the people who are purely money-motivated probably aren’t in your business anyway. Ask yourself if you’re motivated by money. Potential big exit aside, you don’t start an agency to guarantee yourself a big month-to-month wage.

Remember that when you reward people. Training and opportunity are sometimes the reward they actually want. Someone stepped up and went above and beyond? Put them on the next big project. Hand them responsibility as the reward.

Or training. Training is like a bonus, except it also says: we’re investing in you. We don’t just want you to go home with a couple of hundred quid. We want you to get better, to grow this company, and to see your own career flourish.

The right people will grow when you reward them by trusting them. Your best people aren’t unicorns, they’re people you backed. That’s why they are here.

Equity and share options

A final one, because it’s not strictly a bonus, but it’s a related financial incentive. Equity, share options, whatever the mechanism: you give someone the chance to take a share if the company sells.

It’s good when it can be a meaningful amount, and it might be something you restrict to your leadership team. Symbolically it creates buy-in, and you hope, retention.

This is the one that will truly let you step away and have others be fully motivated to take you on to your goals.

But it’s only any good if you’ve actually got a plan to sell. Otherwise you’re just telling people they’ve got a cut of something that might never appear.

That’s a bigger thought right?

One to go deeper on another time.

How I built pipeline and stepped out of delivery

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Everyone’s got a story. And everyone’s reverse-engineered it to make themselves sound clever.

So here’s mine, except I’ve kept the luck in because vulnerability makes me look good.

First, the raw materials

Building pipeline requires conditions outside your control. Demand for your services in the market, and the macroeconomic conditions that make people invest.

When we started our agency the internet was young and supplying all of that. There were enough leads. We didn’t create that, we just showed up at the right time. That matters.

So that’s the first thing that’s out of our control in place. Money was moving around and people wanted what we did.

SEO accident

Our agency was called Lighthouse. When we went to register the company, we found another Lighthouse Web Design already existed. We needed a different name.

I remembered what UK bands did when they broke America and found a US band had the same name. Suede became The London Suede. We were based in London. So: Lighthouse London.

We immediately started ranking for “London web design.” Totally by accident.

Traffic followed. Enquiries followed. We then invested into SEO deliberately, but finding the initial tactic was pure luck.

The hire we got lucky with

Getting out of delivery was about having people good enough to do the work without you, in addition to winning more work.

We made a hire, someone quite junior. Turned out to be one of the best developers I’ve ever worked with. Very good, but at start-of-career salary. And then, their best mate was a designer. Also exceptional. Both eventually made it onto the leadership team. The designer now runs his own agency and is likely reading (👋).

We didn’t find them through a brilliant recruitment process. We just got lucky.

All luck so far, Dan, why am I reading?

But the bit that wasn’t luck follows.

Double down on that channel

When you find a marketing channel that compounds, work it. We took the SEO accident and ran with it.

We also built a profile on a listing site and made sure clients left reviews. Put the effort in consistently, and that listing started paying back more and more, because the ratings boosted the visibility and increased the effectiveness. That led to better clients, which led to better reviews. A flywheel.

What does that channel look like today? I believe in extremely valuable content, whether that’s a newsletter, an event, or something more innovative.

Whatever it is, you don’t have a lot of time to do marketing. So the marketing you do has to compound.

Find something that gets better the more you add to it. Then add to it.

Knowing your numbers

We got on top of the financials. Properly on top. Accounts, forecasts, management reports, everything baked in and giving a true picture of the business.

We worked out what our rate needed to be. We worked out what the billable team could support. And when the numbers showed that the team could cover delivery without me, and we had the leads coming in, we just went for it.

That transition, stepping out of delivery and into full-time sales, only felt possible because we’d done the maths. You can’t make that call on instinct alone. You need to see it in the numbers first.

And then, having mouths to feed is a surprisingly good motivator to go and win the work.

The actual takeaways

The luck was real.

But here are the things we did that made the luck stick, and kept doing throughout our growth.

Do marketing that compounds. Things that grow the longer you invest in them.
Know your numbers. Not roughly. Completely. You need to see the path before you can walk it.
Find the right people. We didn’t plan for those people, but we recognised them when they arrived.
Right place, right time gives you the opening. What you do with it is up to you.

Closed systems aren't for founders

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Are you more likely to stop reading because my writing doesn’t hook you, or because you aren’t interested in the subject?

One is a packaging problem. The other an ICP problem.

To fix one I need the other to stay the same while I experiment.

As an agency founder you are chief problem solver (CPS). But there’s an uncomfortable truth (and I’m not just saying that to hook you).

As you grow, you need to assess different parts of your business for the value they bring.

To do that you need to try and see past the things outside their control.

Sales need to close deals, but you can’t blame them if all the leads are tyre-kickers.

Marketing needs to provide high-quality leads, but they need a good niche chosen by the founder.

Designers need to deliver high-quality work, unless the client is terrible, which is sales and marketing’s fault.

So you try to isolate these teams, set goals they are fully in control of, and judge and motivate them effectively.

You create a closed system, and there’s nothing wrong with that. People can thrive in one.

And you want to thrive as a leader too, right?

You don’t get one.

As founder, everything is your system. The quality of the work. The people you hired. The market you chose to serve. The culture. Your habits.

And things that are completely outside of your control, they sit inside your system too.

There’s no edge. Nothing falls outside.

Nothing is going to stay still while you solve a particular problem.

You’ll never isolate your own performance or find something that you aren’t accountable for.

Because the market will hold you accountable whether you like it or not.

And you need to get comfortable with that, because that’s the job. Owning that accountability without blaming yourself for how things go is the mindset.

The comfort of the closed system is not for you.

This is the path you chose, and there’s a bright side. With no limits to your system, you’ll never be more autonomous. The highs are yours too.

Someone once told me that running a business is like riding a tiger.

People look and say, “Wow, so cool. You’re riding a tiger.”

And you look back at them, and do your best to smile casually, whilst wondering if this was the best move, and thinking of ways to avoid being eaten.

Why design agency founders get trapped

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Design agencies are different to marketing agencies.

You could frame it as systems vs creativity, or ahrefs vs Figma, or retainer vs projects.

But fundamentally it’s because design is different to marketing.

It requires a different brain.

I wouldn’t say design is easier than marketing. But I do think that the brain that can do it is more scarce.

And that shapes a lot of things.

Where design agencies come from

A design agency usually doesn’t get founded. It just happens to someone.

Someone with design talent gets so much in demand that a business appears around them. And they have just enough business sense to put it together.

That combination, it transpires, is potent.

Design talent plus entrepreneurial spirit makes for someone who is extraordinarily effective at identifying problems and solving them. Their clients end up very happy. Referrals start flooding in. And they turn those referrals into work with very little effort, because they show up to sales calls knowing exactly what they’re talking about.

Everything you need for a successful business is there. With one problem.

An identity problem

Design agency founders are reluctant entrepreneurs. They’ve seen “sales” in action and their inbox is full of outreach. Never in a million years would they act like that, so they identify as someone who doesn’t sell or market to people.

This leads to them remaining a naive maverick in these areas, unable to understand what’s working or ever scale that secret sauce.

Let me talk to those founders for a moment.

If you are in business, then you are selling and marketing.

If you don’t know you are doing those things, then you are incredibly good at it.

Go to a big, successful agency and you’ll find business development teams trying incredibly hard to be consultative, authentic and authoritative.

They are trying to be you.

The scaling problem

What happens when you try to grow?

As an unaware sales superstar you can get far, but you will hit a ceiling. Sometimes this can be years in, when company culture and your own habits are set.

Moving beyond your referral network when it’s so tempting just to lean on that network and focus your attention elsewhere is hard.

But Trap 1. That type of pipeline relies on you.

And then there’s the fact that design, as a discipline, doesn’t like to be scaled.

A lot of marketing can be broken down into systems. Repeatable tactics. Campaign maintenance. You can document those things and hire people specifically to run them.

Design is harder to systematise. The talent required is scarce and the work is rarely the same twice.

Every project needs that experienced head. (Trap 2)

Adding and managing clients is hard too. Not because clients aren’t happy. But because the way the founder keeps them happy is with their own design effort. (Trap 3)

To afford expensive people, you need to know your delivery margins. You need to know what your rate has to be. You need a clear picture of project profitability.

But roll back to how these businesses begin. A talented person with a bit of entrepreneurial spirit. Those financial metrics are often not in place. In fact, “financial metrics” sits close to “sales” in the list of dirty words.

And when it’s just you, you can get round them anyway.

Working the weekend. Discounting hours to keep the client happy.

All leaving a mess where a project profitability report should be.

Not the foundation from which you confidently commit to a large new hire.

But who’s got time for reports when the projects need you? (Trap 4)

The ceiling

Design agencies are different because design talent is in demand and they grow around people.

This makes them amazingly effective up to a point.

They hit a ceiling of what that person can support.

How do you replace yourself?

You can do it on vibes.

Or you can recognise the value you bring and sort your numbers to the point where you can pay for someone else to deliver that value.

Honestly, it’ll be a bit of both. An opportunity may present itself. A lucky junior hire that overdelivers, or a price-insensitive client that delivers margin even with your poor financial tracking.

And then that headroom lets you start to sort things out.

But only if you spot the chance. Only if you identify with the entrepreneur inside that got you into this.

Say it with me.

“I do sales.”

What a chance encounter taught me about cold email

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every meaningful relationship you have right now exists because someone reached out.

And if you think back to how they did it… you can learn something.

We’ve done bad

How did we get so bad at the simple act of introducing ourselves to someone we don’t know?

How did we get to the point where we spend time screenshotting people’s attempts and posting them with the caption “look at this idiot”?

I’m not blaming you for outreach shaming. We all do it.

We do it because we’re frustrated. Frustrated at the sheer volume of emails and DMs we have to wade through.

But the unwanted outcome is that we so don’t want to add to the pile that we’ve decided we shouldn’t bother trying to meet anyone new.

Sure, you can grow a business without proactively reaching out. Many of us get very comfortable with referral life. But writing it off entirely isn’t helpful. It’s a viable channel. At certain points of growth, it’s the right channel. You just need to do it well.

The people who get outreach shamed aren’t doing it well.

They’ve done it so badly you’ve recoiled.

The person who does it well? You didn’t even really notice.

The hotbox (a short story)

When I started university, everyone from my course on the first day was put into a room together.

It was a hot day and the room barely big enough for us all. No one knew anyone.

People started chatting because of proximity. The person next to me was asking questions that required commitments. What clubs had I looked at? What were my plans after this awkward fest? Did I think everyone was going for a drink.

I didn’t like it and moved away.

As I moved away and failed to connect with (actively avoided) anyone else, I found myself heading for the door.

I stepped outside into the corridor and felt the cool air. Relax.

I would have got my smartphone out, but they weren’t invented yet (why are you so ageist?), so I read a notice board.

There was another guy out there from the course. We silently acknowledged each other and stood a comfortable distance apart, sharing a silent moment in the cool air of the corridor.

Then he spoke.

“It fucking stinks in there.”

That was it. No pitch, no ask, no agenda.

Just a relatable comment about how it “fucking stinks in there”

We became best mates.

Granted, I’ve never bought anything off him.

OK here’s the lesson

Introducing yourself well isn’t about forcing the issue, it’s about being in the right places (the corridor), at the right time (the course intro day), being passively visible (the nod of acknowledgement when I came out) and then taking the opportunity (the thing he said, I won’t swear again).

That isn’t easy, it doesn’t happen every day, it’s much softer than an offer in an email.

It involves doing things that feel like they are getting you nowhere. Like showing up in places and helping without asking for anything back.

But new introductions don’t happen at all unless you are proactive.

How you make them happen is your choice, whether you need to make them happen is not.

Track time for now. Tomorrow it will be tokens.

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

As an agency founder you can identify as lots of things.

Entrepreneur (hard to spell but nice to say)
Leader (for the LinkedIn)
Imposter (not a real syndrome btw, just a belief)

Probably the most important thing you are… is an allocator of resource.

However many people are on your team, however many clients you have, however you bill, you are deciding where effort goes and for how long.

To know if you’re doing that well, you need to measure it.

Knowing how you’re allocating resource means knowing your profitability. It’s how you grow. And it’s how you eventually get out of delivery.

And ultimately this is your job.

You’re taking an asset your business has and investing it.

Are you doing that well?

What’s your unit of resource?

Let me save you some time. It’s time.

You might not do hourly billing. You might think/know/wonder if the billable hour is dead. You might do value-based pricing or performance-based pricing or any-based pricing.

None of that matters for this conversation.

We’re not talking about how you bill. We’re talking about how you allocate resource. And for that, time is your unit.

Not because it’s perfect.

It very much isn’t.

Time is flawed

If I spend an hour on your project first thing in the morning after good night’s sleep, no interruptions, genuinely struck by inspiration, that hour is worth quite a lot.

The hour the following day, after a heavy lunch, when something’s gone wrong with the API and I can’t get it to urgh igiveup… that hour is worth considerably less. The bit of work I did turns out to be pretty meaningless. The hour isn’t worth the clock it ticked around.

Those two units are not the same.

Time is blunt, imprecise, and occasionally infuriating. But energy and inspiration have no measurements.

But value is the output. We need to track the input. (Because the difference is profit)

So time is far from perfect but it’s the best thing we have.

Knowing what each unit costs

The other thing you need to know is what you pay for each unit of resource.

This is a bit easier for your team or freelancers. It’s the salary or the invoice.

It’s harder when it’s you. What even is your pay? Profit? The random amounts you withdraw depending on how you’re doing?

An hour of effort in a month where you paid yourself less is not cheaper than an hour in a month where you paid yourself a bonus. The cost of your time doesn’t change because your cashflow did.

Base it on what your salary should be.

Does that mean you aren’t making a profit anymore? Well that’s unpleasant, certainly. But knowing it is how you grow.

What all of this gives you

When you know how many hours everyone spends, and what those hours cost, you can work out which of your clients makes you the big money. That calculation is your delivery margin - the one KPI that doesn’t lie. And which of them barely makes you any money at all.

You can fix clients and rates and get yourself to a position where all the resource you need is other people. You know what it costs. You know it makes money. You can choose the clients and price the projects that build a business that doesn’t rely on you billing.

And if you’re not allocating yourself as a resource and you’ve genuinely stepped out of delivery then congratulations.

You don’t have to track your time anymore (but your team do).

But I do value-based pricing

Great. I like you for that. Please continue to read my newsletter.

Here’s the thing. A 10K workshop where you’ve imparted a day’s worth of knowledge that transforms someone’s strategy. That is still a day of your time.

You could have spent that time on something else. You were wise not to. But you still allocated your time.

And hopefully at some point you’ll have to choose between the client doing 10K workshops and the one doing 15K. But those 15K workshops take a bit longer to prep for.

Which one is actually more profitable?

You need to know.

This article has a shelf life

I want to end on something we’re still working out.

Everything above applies to human resource. But there’s a new kind of resource creeping into agency delivery.

AI tokens.

Right now, if you’re using AI tools across your business, you’re probably treating the cost as software overhead. That’s fine. Honestly, it’s probably the right call for now. But you should know what you’re spending.

The LLM providers are in land grab mode, making a loss on those tokens in exchange for getting you hooked on their software.

There’s 2 ways this plays out. They work out how to deliver cheaper or they start upping those prices. It’s happening already. Notice the “fast” modes that are appearing. Known also as “we don’t want to say that normal mode is a bit slow now”.

Token allocation per project will be on your reports soon.

Can’t wait.

Until then, track your time.

Cold outreach is like wearing a giant green hat

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Wondering if you can get good at winning work from emails is the same as wondering if you can look good in a big green hat.

It’s all about how you wear it.

If you’ve never worn one before and then one day just stick it on and walk out the door? No one knows why you are wearing it and you look ridiculous.

That’s your cold email.

Buy from me. Here’s my case study. Click this link. People back away. The first impression is look at me energy with notable headwear.

And we know we are going to see you again in 3 days time, on a schedule, checking in, with the hat. You aren’t wearing it for us, you’re wearing it for you.

But there are people who pull it off.

Look at the catwalks of Paris, London, Milan. Full of giant green hats (probably). And people think they look great. They seek out photos. They pay to be on the front row.

The people wearing them haven’t just suddenly put them on and hoped for the best. They’ve spent time cultivating a position as trendsetters. They’ve shown they understand hats at any size. They’ve piqued your curiosity around what colour hat might be the next big thing.

And they’ve done this over a long period of time. Built reputation and relationships to the point where, when they finally put on the giant green hat, everyone says, “That’s bloody brilliant.”

Selling by email (or any selling really) is no different.

If your first message is on the nose? You’re the person who just walked into the room wearing a giant green hat with no context.

But if you’ve managed to make someone aware of you, because your content made them curious, your comments made them think, your name kept showing up in the right places, then when you eventually reach out to talk about that project or ask for that meeting, what you offer looks a lot more interesting.

That takes years.

Same offer. Same hat.

You’ve just earned the right to wear it. When the time is right, starting that conversation well is the whole game.

The rules apply to you

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ever looked at financial KPIs and thought - “one day I’ll care”?

Because when you are small it’s easy, just you and the revenue, no surprises.

Won a new project? It’s going to be a good couple of months.

Tax bill time? Cash is going down a bit.

There’s one number that matters - the bank balance.

You’ve got a couple of spreadsheets you’ve pulled together, probably motivated by one of those tax bills. But that’s as CF-oh as you’ve CF-got.

Gross profit, COGS, delivery margins, staff cost ratio, real rate calculations, EBITDA. These are all for big agencies where the founder long ago stopped doing what they love and are instead stuck looking at graphs.

Shapes and numbers that control our lives (like playing cards can if you play too much poker).

However (it was coming!) you do have those things.

Just because you are small doesn’t mean you don’t have delivery margins, or net profit. They are just tangled up in you and how you work.

Calculating KPIs requires good data. Salaries, invoices, timesheets. Billed and unbilled time. Full transparency.

Yours are hard to calculate because you’ve got a business to run and you won’t let them sit still.

You take random amounts out of the business each month as pay. You discount that piece of work the client didn’t like. You’re not tracking time (or at least not the bit extra you did).

Just because they are hard to calculate doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

But it’s fine because you can instinctively know whether you are profitable because the bank balance goes up. And it’s obvious which of your clients makes you the money (the one on the higher rate that doesn’t keep asking for changes). And I know you know which one doesn’t.

Except it doesn’t take much to lose touch with those instincts.

A new hire or freelance cost means you now have delivery costs that don’t bend any more.

A rate negotiation because the client is buying big could mean you have to suddenly know what margin you’ll make.

The bank balance starts to include larger costs you need to pay and money that you’ve had to collect for the taxman (or taxwoman).

Getting the numbers wrong now can really get you stuck on large projects with bad rates or get left short for cash.

It becomes apparent you had KPIs all along, and if you could see them they would tell you things aren’t right.

So it’s never too early.

You can still do all the over-servicing and discounting you need to grow, and you can still take less out on the slow months, you’ll just have a clear picture of what that means.

Consider these now:

Put all VAT (or sales tax) aside the moment revenue comes in. For profit-based tax, calculate what you owe at the end of each month and put that aside too.
Set yourself a salary commensurate with the market rate for what you deliver. Even when you don’t take it all out, it’s important to know what you would have cost. Your profit numbers aren’t real until you do. Use this figure as your own delivery cost when calculating margins.
Track everyone’s time. Even if you don’t bill by the hour or day, log what people spend on each project.
Use that time data, your staff costs (salaries, taxes, pensions) and any freelancer bills to work out what it costs you to deliver work for each client.
Use the invoices from each client to work out what you earn from them.
Now subtract the delivery costs from what you earned to get your delivery margin for each client. A healthy benchmark is 55%–65%.
Finally, divide what you earned by the total time spent to find your effective hourly rate. At reasonable utilisation, this should be upwards of 2.5x the blended hourly cost of the people doing the work.

Dip your toe into the bath of financial KPIs - today might be the day you start to care.

And these are for you to own, every expert does it a bit differently, find what’s useful now and go with it.

However small you are, something is more useful than nothing.

The one thing I'll never do to you

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve spent a bit of time on LinkedIn the last few days and I need to say something.

It’s all horsebutt.

A load of people have learnt how to hack my brain. I get a little jolt: “I need to care about this.” So I click, scroll and look for closure on that feeling.

And then I realise there’s nothing there.

And now not only did I waste the attention I just paid. I didn’t learn anything or move forward in any way at all.

Stupid language hacks, funnels and algorithms.

Fair play to humanity - we did this amazingly 🎖️

So this one is for you if you are prone to a tired excursion into the sea of authority built on your insecurity that is today’s internet.

You’re using your resources, your attention, your energy, your investment to its absolute max. You’re operating inside a chaotic system. Micro chaos: clients, staff. Macro chaos: the economy, the market. And you’re growing chaotically because of that.

You don’t need to know all of this stuff.

Sure, there are moments where you need to learn something new. You hit a common growth problem and you deal with it. But there are always gonna be problems.

It’s problems all the way up.

Deal with a problem too early and it’ll slow you down just as much.

Installing a CRM before you have any contacts, build a list without an offer, writing automated proposal processes before you’ve closed anything.

Pointless.

You need to start without all that. And as you grow, things slowly become inappropriate for the size and scale you are. Then you adjust.

That’s how you got this far.

And I know you only see the problems.

And that’s why when someone writes a post about that problem you get sucked in.

Having sucked someone in the author can choose to help you or manipulate you. Truthfully, running a business means doing a bit of both. I hope I never overstep the line.

Overstepping the line would be anything that made you feel bad.

You shouldn’t feel bad. Whatever the current state of your business you did something few people do. You’re probably doing better than you realise.

Inside all those agencies you admire?

If they are growing, it’s a ****show.

They’ve just got the next set of problems.

The only way to get a perfect system is to stand still, stop growing, and wait for the end.

Then after you’ve closed your agency you can document that system and sell it to me on LinkedIn. I’m waiting, ready to click.

The hire that won't pay for themselves

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I need to hire someone vs I can afford to hire someone.

These are two similar statements from different parts of your body.

The analysis that you can afford to hire someone comes from the brain and the feeling of need comes from your gut.

Actually scrap that.

The need comes from your brain when you’re trying to juggle multiple projects and run a business.

There’s no time to analyse, the need is what makes you act.

But… can you actually afford that hire?

You walk it back.

You now have enough work for another person because you’ve just won a new deal or your existing clients want more work. The groundwork before that decision - sorting your cash position and securing client commitments - is what makes the maths more reliable.

Two figures often pop into your head.

The first is the expected revenue from that new project. The second is the salary of that new person.

I’m gonna earn X amount a month from that new project, and that person is gonna get paid ‘annual salary divided by twelve’ per month.

It’s a quick piece of maths designed to assess the risk that you won’t be able to meet payroll.

Unfortunately it’s no good (although you did get the number of months in a year right 👍).

Why this maths fails

There are other costs of employing someone, like taxes and software costs and social costs. So unless you’re gonna employ them, not give them any software, have no company events and commit tax fraud, you haven’t actually modelled whether you can meet payroll.

The deeper problem: margin

The second reason it doesn’t work is because they need to contribute to margin.

Your business has:

overheads, this person needs to help cover them
growth targets, this person needs to make money on top of that so you can be profitable
management overhead: they need to pay for the time you can’t earn because you’re managing them

And most importantly they need to also contribute to margin so you can grow.

Adding the leadership and support of another person, the financial, cognitive, time, and effort overhead of another employee, and accepting that you might just cover their employment costs in return is a poor move.

It’s akin to taking on a new client at a breakeven rate. Not only are they gonna stop you growing, but you’re now paying an opportunity cost of everything else you could do with that time and effort.

Why your instincts get worse as you grow

It’s unlikely to be as bad as that, let’s give your brain some credit, even when it’s beaten down and overworked.

You probably are gonna make money from this person. You just don’t know how much. And as you grow, your ability to guess how much, without doing some proper maths, reduces.

You’re gonna have multiple people on projects, multiple projects at different rates. Bigger projects become less efficient because of the feedback loops and client management gets harder.

All this stuff is gonna move around, and your vibes are gonna be more and more off.

That little piece of mental maths is gonna put you in a spot where you’re not making enough money. And if that spot is with a big client or a big hire, you’re gonna find it a hard place to untangle yourself from. The process of fixing a low margin project is gonna take time and energy away from the rest of your growth.

Over the next few weeks we are going to do some maths together. If you want a head start, delivery margin is the KPI that makes all of this visible.

Next time you realise you’re too busy you’ll have something to reach for to give you the confidence that you can afford that new person, what to pay them, and what you need them to bill.

And as well as some sums we’ll make sure we understand the levers.

Because we are very 2026 right now and as the benchmark for what an agency needs to make from its people shifts we are going to need to see clearly the change we need to make.